High up in the natural wonder of the French Alps, the climbers who spend their days among the rockfaces and glaciers have come to a grim conclusion: the mountains are falling down around them.

In the Mont Blanc range, a m1agnet for mountaineers in the summer, many popular routes up or through the peaks have become too dangerous to take because of the risk of falling debris.

"It's going quickly. Ten years ago, I'd have never thought that it would accelerate like this," said Ludovic Ravanel, an academic at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc who has been studying major rockfalls in the area.

"And if you look at the predictions from my climatologist colleagues, for the next 10 to 20 years, it's only going to get worse," he told AFP.

In many areas of western Europe, climate change is happening too slowly to be noticed, although two record-setting heatwaves in June and July this summer as well as water shortages are focusing minds.

Around Mont Blanc, the warming has already left physical scars.

In 2005, following a major heatwave two years earlier, a huge shard of granite called the Bonatti pillar suddenly collapsed, spewing 292,000 m3 of rock into the valley below and stunning the mountaineering community.

With it went a feature visible from the nearby resort town of Chamonix, as well as the dreams of many climbers hoping to take on a legendary challenge named after celebrated Italian mountaineer Walter Bonatti.

Major rockfalls on less famous routes continue regularly, without fanfare, and would go unnoticed were it not for the work of researchers like Ravanel who tracked them for his PhD.

Occasionally, they register more widely in the climbing community, like a collapse on the Arete des Cosmiques ridge last summer that is often taken by beginners hoping to take on the 4,810-metre Mont-Blanc peak, the highest in western Europe.

"There's not much time left for certain rockfaces," warned 37-year-old Ravanel, whose father was a mountain guide.

The reason is that permafrost -- the year-round ice found at high altitude -- is melting and with it the glue that binds together giant slabs of rock.

Retreating glaciers, which are melting under the effect of higher temperatures, are also leaving the peaks more vulnerable and less supported.

Though erosion is a constant natural process -- and rockfall has been a danger since climbing began -- the effects of climate change are believed by scientists to be speeding up the rate of attrition in the Alps.

- Legendary climbs no longer -

Worries about the impact of shorter winters and hotter summers are commonplace in the ski businesses and mountain refuges where people depend on adventure sports for their livelihoods.

At a high-altitude refuge called Couvercle above the Mer de Glace glacier, conversations among the 50 guides and climbers staying there for the night focused as usual on security.

Many wanted to know if it would re-freeze overnight, making the snow firmer, or whether certain routes were open and safe to pass in the current conditions.

But all of them shared scare stories that they linked to global warming, including a 40-year-old guide from the nearby town of Thonon who was climbing the Aiguille du Peigne in the Chamonix area.

"The rock starting vibrating," he said. "I won't be in a hurry to go back."

A table of trainee guides, athletic young men under 30 aiming for careers in the industry, voiced their worries about the future of their profession.

They said they had seen the change even in their relatively short lifetimes.

"The snow trails are hit-and-miss. In June, you used to be able to go for it. Nowadays it's not always possible and in July, forget about it," one of them, Remi, said.

His friend, who declined to give his name, said that spring rather than summer had become the busy period for serious climbers.

"It's better than July-August for people who really want to do proper climbing stuff," he said.

When he mentions how he has to avoid some of the legendary routes, the table goes quiet.

"The amazing granite, the legendary faces, you know it's going to drop," he said.

- Disappearing routes -

Confirmation of the decay came in a recent study based on a popular mountaineering book published in 1973 by famed climber Gaston Rebuffat called "100 Most Beautiful Routes".

Ravanel and fellow academics analysed the routes in order to measure how they had changed in the more than 45 years since the first appearance of the book, a bible for several generations of mountaineers.

A majority of them had been affected by climate change, concluded the study in June, including 26 which were "very affected" and three which no longer existed.

The team of mountain specialists at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc looked at the ice and snow coverage, as well as the extent of exposed rock and the state of the glaciers, where crevasses are widening.

The optimal climbing conditions had moved to the spring and autumn, it said, while routes in general had become more dangerous and technically more difficult.

For guides, the unpredictability of the conditions, with unexpected warm spells in winter or late snowfalls, is making a dangerous job even more nerve-wracking.

But some are keen to simply enjoy it while they can.

"I've started to accept quite a few things," admits Yann Grava, 33, who will finish his training to be a guide next year. "On average, a guide used to be able to work for about 15 years, but for me I think it'll be around 10. The mountains are falling."

Chilean Patagonia: an open-air lab to study climate change
Seno Ballena, Chile (AFP) Aug 29, 2019 - In one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, the southernmost part of Chile's Patagonia region, scientists are studying whales, dolphins and algae in order to help predict how climate change will affect the world's oceans.

For the study, four researchers from the Austral University of Chile embarked from Punta Arenas for the remote Seno Ballena fjord.

The fjord currently produces the kind of conditions that should be seen in other marine systems in the next few decades, when dramatic changes are expected in the environment due to increased carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere and the melting of glaciers.

"This place is like an actual experiment in nature because it allows us, without needing to conduct experiments in the lab, to know what will happen without imagining it," marine biologist Maximiliano Vergara told AFP.

Reaching the fjord is no easy task -- they had to negotiate the treacherous Strait of Magellan that connects the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans for a day and a half aboard a small raft adapted for scientific research, with winds exceeding 100 kilometers (60 miles) per hour and glacial temperatures.

On site, they take readings from a system of sensors that provide a constant stream of data from water samples taken every three hours.

The researchers are analyzing the chemical, physical and biological variables of the waters, which show lower levels of pH, salinity and calcium, especially in the most shallow areas, as a consequence of climate change.

"What we're doing at the moment is establishing our information baseline," Vergara said.

- Dire consequences -

Seno Ballena gets its name from the humpback whales that feed in the area after travelling down from the warmer waters of Central America, where they breed.

The chilly fjord waters provide one of the most productive marine habitats in the world, where sardines and krill can be found in huge numbers.

But climate change poses a threat to its ecosystem as the melting of a glacier on Santa Ines island and increased rainfall have led to rising levels of freshwater.

If that continues, it would have dire consequences for whales as the plankton they feed on could disappear.

"A change in the microalgae could generate changes in the secondary structure (of the marine system) or the animals that feed on these," marine biologist Marco Antonio Pinto told AFP.

Under normal circumstances, when there is an abundance of microalgae, these provide food for the zooplankton that subsequently nourish the food chain all the way up to whales, said Pinto.

The expedition members are taking samples from eight stations around Seno Ballena to measure the effects of the melting glacier on Santa Ines, which has accelerated to such an extent that rocks have appeared that weren't visible during their last trip in April.

"The waters of high latitudes, both in the northern and southern hemispheres, contain a huge amount of biological and physiochemical information that can be used as a basis to take crucial decisions for environmental preservation projects in developed countries," said biologist Maximo Frangopulos, a professor at the University of Magellanes and leader of the expedition.

The scientists are worried about the potential for a red tide -- a phenomenon brought on by excessive numbers of microorganisms that absorb a huge amount of oxygen and produce toxins, resulting in the deaths of much marine life.

- 'It's like a puzzle' -

For now, researchers have noted a slight drop in the number of humpback whales but an increase in other species such as sea lions, which previously were not present in that region, and dolphins.

They also found a lower concentration of calcium carbonate, something which can affect the shells of marine organisms such as mollusks or krill, a staple of a whale's diet.

"It's like a puzzle that we're trying to put together... to see how climate change can affect not just the baseline marine system, but also the large mammals, something that would have a social and economic impact on the region," said Pinto.

The crab, a species vital to the economy of the region around the strait, is another that could be affected as it needs calcium to harden its shell.

The scientists are set to return to the area during the Southern Hemisphere winter to obtain new samples -- and to see what other secrets the waters in this area of Chilean Patagonia can reveal.

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